“Orchestral excerpts - 3” proclaims the title of
this Wagner collection. In fact there are ten minutes of singing
and this is not just another collection of Wagnerian ‘bleeding
chunks’. A serious attempt is made here to construct three
orchestral sequences from three Wagnerian operas which make
some sort of musical sense. The fact that the attempt does not
entirely succeed does not make it any the less praiseworthy.

The linking of the Tannhäuser overture to the Venusberg
music which constitutes the opening scene of the opera is a
procedure with considerable precedent. There can be two different
ways of doing this. Either you play the whole of the original
overture and then append the ballet music as a second track
- which is what Wagner actually approved in Paris, and Solti
does in his Vienna recording released as part of Decca’s
luxury reissue of the Ring - or you can cut the final
section of the overture and lead directly into the ballet music
- which is what Wagner recommended in later performances of
the ‘Paris version’. The problem with the latter
is that the ballet music, substantially rewritten by Wagner
some twenty years after the first performance of the opera,
is in his post-Tristan style and can tend to overwhelm
the more classical style of the rest of the score. Those who
lead directly from the overture into the ballet, as Solti and
Sinopoli do in their complete sets, give the overture a more
substantial and ‘beefy’ Wagnerian sound especially
in the grandiose statement of the Pilgrims’ March, which
balances the styles less anachronistically. What Schwarz does
here is to scale back the romantic effusions of the Venusberg
music to match a more classically oriented approach as shown
by his relatively brisk approach to the Pilgrims. This really
does neither Wagner’s earlier nor later styles any favours.
If the climax of the Love Duet in Tristan is a depiction
of coitus interruptus, the climax of the Venusberg music
is surely Wagner’s depiction of a full orgiastic orgasm.
Not here; it is simply too polite. It is not helped by the sensuous
unaccompanied chorus of the sirens being replaced by a nicely
played but far too decorous woodwind transcription.

After the Venusberg has faded into the sensuous distance, we
are abruptly brought - with far too short a pause - into the
gloomy reflections of the Meistersinger Act Three Prelude.
There has been a tradition for some years of constructing a
Meistersinger suite from the Third Act Prelude, followed
by the Dance of the Apprentices, proceeding through the orchestral
passage which leads to the Entry of the Masters, but substituting
for the latter passage the whole of the Overture. This at least
has the merit of bringing the work to a conclusion that Wagner
himself would have recognised. Schwarz instead proceeds through
the Entry of the Masters (with its diminuendo conclusion)
and simply adds the last few bars of the opera to form a conclusion.
This lacks the balance of the longer ‘suite’ and
the ending feels disconcertingly abrupt. Given the length of
this CD we could have had the whole of the Overture in the more
usual fashion.

With Tristan und Isolde Wagner himself sanctioned the
idea of conflating the opening Prelude and the closing ‘Verklärung’
- as he called what we nowadays refer to as the Liebestod
- to form a sort of microcosm of the whole drama. He even wrote
a quite extended passage of music to link the two passages,
which seems to have fallen into total disuse since 1945 at least
- Newman in his Wagner Nights describes it as ‘usual’
before that time - but which was revived for the Proms this
season and shows revealingly how Wagner envisaged the whole
package working. More usually nowadays, especially when a singer
is available, we are given the whole of the Prelude and the
whole of the Liebestod without any linking passage; this
too works quite well. Here however we are given two further
passages between the usual two excerpts. Brangaene’s
Warning is a bleeding chunk indeed, starting and stopping
quite arbitrarily; and the Act Three Prelude - which should
fade away upwards into the atmosphere as the shepherd’s
pipe is heard from offstage - instead curls back down again
in the violins to lead into the Liebestod, which is surely
a betrayal of Wagner’s carefully calculated intentions.

So none of these three sets of excerpts is ideal textually but
one feels that they might have been better served if the performances
had been more convincing. The orchestral playing is fine, but
it never has the really romantic Wagnerian sound - it is at
its best in a passage like the lightly scored Dance of the
Apprentices, but nobody is going to buy a CD for the Dance
of the Apprentices. Even here the balance relegates the
important glockenspiel part to a rather unconvincing tinkling
background.

Schwarz is an efficient and reliable conductor, but one never
feels that his heart is really in the music; the first part
of the Tristan Prelude maintains a Goodall-like glacial
nobility, but it then accelerates too abruptly towards the climax
in a manner that feels applied rather than organic. Alessandra
Marc is an excellent singer, thankfully free of the gusty tone
production which afflicts too many Wagnerian sopranos today.
She sings with expressiveness, delicacy and a real feeling for
the text but she is not helped by a very forward balance. This
is just about acceptable in the Liebestod - although
it obscures some orchestral detail - but is quite simply grotesque
in Brangaene’s Warning where in the opera the off-stage
voice is accompanied by a delicate filigree of divided strings
which weave their counterpoint around the voice. Here the string
lines are relegated to the background and the whole point of
this beautiful episode is lost.

One is most grateful to Naxos for their reissues from the Delos
back catalogue. These have included many invaluable and superb
recordings not only of American music but of real rarities which
have fully reflected Schwarz’s adventurous programming
in Seattle in the 1980s and 1990s. That said, one cannot help
but feel that this is a recording which could well have been
left to gather dust on the shelf. Except for fans of Alessandra
Marc this cannot be recommended over the many superb collections
of Wagnerian ‘bleeding chunks’ from the likes of
Klemperer, Karajan, Solti and their successors, many of them
now available at bargain prices. One plus point, however: we
are given texts and translations of what Marc sings, and the
anonymous translations attributed to ‘Naxos’ are
really very good in coping with Wagner’s flowery expression.

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